It is the perhaps the world's most famous prehistoric monument, and one of Britain's most treasured sites.

But the people who created Stonehenge - anywhere between 3.000 and 2,000 BC - carried out a series of botch jobs that would shame even the most shoddy of tradesmen.

Professor Ronald Hutton an expert on Paganism from Bristol University, described the great stone circle in Wiltshire as "a unique and possibly failed experiment."

He said one of the giant sandstone slabs had broken in two during construction, but that rather than throwing it away and crafting a new one, the builders simply "put one broken bit on top of the other broken bit, jammed a lintel on top and hoped they'd stay together.

"The didn't, the fell over quite soon after," he said.

Prof Hutton told the Daily Mail that the pressure on the builders and lack of available resources were at "the heart of the disaster that Stonehenge ended up being."

He said that due to a combination of factors, including "shoddy or high-pressure gaining" engineering, "we have lost the great engineering feat of Stonehenge."